Category: pirate-style

The better a song is, the harder it is to craft a remix that does it justice. And sometimes the best remixes are the lightest — the laziest — at the level of execution.

On the other side: my inbox is increasingly clogged with promo “EPs” built from two original songs with at least four remixes, most of which are mediocre in the exact same way. It’s like the producers and the remixers only feel comfortable expressing one idea, the same idea, an idea they learned from reading blogs, the same blogs. I love music, but I also love silence, and the delete button too.

But back to the good songs.

As I wrote before, “You can think about a song – a good song – as a miraculous moment when all the dissonances that frame a person’s life drop out of sight long enough to see how it looks without them. So when a band you like hits that groove, sometimes all you can do is listen, because that moment will be leaving.”

Here are two such songs with their recent remix/edits. First off, “Jarabi” from the gorgeous Afrocubism album:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

…which gets a kickkicksnare treatment from Subsuelo, who rebrand their creation “Cinco Pasos.” Five steps. Two bodies. One song which is endless, and nobody we trust wouldn’t dance to it. How can real joy be optional?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thing about Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited is that they are even better than their name, even better than their album covers. The style is Chimurgenga, which emerged from Mapfumo reconfiguring traditional Shona music for modern niceties such as the electric guitar, back when he was a Rhodesian chicken farmer.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

How can you remix this — and not be an elephant in the flower garden? You can’t. So Canadian producer Caribou treads lightly. He pitches “Shumba” up a bit. Then he stretches it out to more than twice the original length. The resulting tune is released on a 12″ called ‘Edits‘ (not remixes). Fair enough.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This game — original and edit, version and stretch — could go on all day. It could go on forever. It does. Frictions of power and access and stewardship notwithstanding, it’s one of the the only games we musicians know how to play with each other.

Something’s in the air this fall. I’m seized with a terrible sadness at the passing of things. (Reading heavy Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti’s Los Adioses is not helping. “No es que crea imposible curarse, sino que no cree en el valor, en la trascendencia de curarse”…). Maybe it’s the cool weather, the planetary alignments, my mysterious heart beating in & out of sync with your mysterious heart, some odd combination of forces which shudder and cough as the new season begins.

Here’s a song which I released on Soot two years back, by Filastine. Fits the mood. Flamenco swirls pitch contemplative, lean elegiac…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Grey Filastine discusses the recording session, or you can just check the video — note microphone taped to cardboard box:

Last I blogged about Filastine was his Copenhagen Sound Swarm project – a high-volume multichannel bike-mounted soundsystem to be used inside the Bike Bloc during the Copenhagen Climate summit.

[Sound Swarm bicycles in preparation]

Months later he has upped a frustratingly short description/documentation of what happened… (Why does it seem that that the people making the best memories have the least time/inclination to ‘record’ and ‘share’ them? This may be a blessing). Here’s an excerpt:

The Sound Swarm is a rolling loudspeaker orkestra, a loose choreography of bicycles who together form a distributed mobile sound system to be used for direct action interventions or just ripping a hole in the fabric of everyday life.

Aggregated into sub-swarms according to our tools: ants with megaphones hats, birds with home-made resonant 5-gallon bucket speaker systems, fish with a collection of 80’s boomboxes, and bees with megaphones mounted on tall crutches. Each of these groups was fed a distinct audio channel via four fm transmitters mounted on the queen bee, a type of chariot built from two tall bikes with a cockpit in the center for the sound controller. The queen is armed with so many batteries, cables, gadgets, and antennas that it looked more lunar landing craft than anything for use on this planet. One of the festival curators called it “something from the next century”. We can only hope she is right, that the art of the future will be made from junk, powered by human sweat, and defy the law.

. . . we rolled off curbs, over cobblestones, through grass, dodging police, sometimes cowering under a plastic sheet during brief rain showers, while controlling five-channels of sound spread across thirty moving speakers in a chaotic mass of hundreds of bicycles pouring through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city.

Eyebeam Open Studios, this Friday 3-6pm in the Chelsea space. I will present a cumbia research project I’m working on as one of Eyebeam’s resident artists this season. La Congona New Cumbia will culminate in a mixtape CD + bilingual poster, and be documented on our blog of the same name.

So feel free to drop by and see/say what’s up. A very diverse group of people will be showing their work-in-progress. For example: while I’m doing weird cumbia distribution/circulation mapping & hotwiring bootleg networks, Ted Southern, pictured below, is building honest-to-God astronaut gloves. (the last pair he designed outperformed NASA gloves on NASA’s own tests). Astronaut gloves!

Open Studios continue on Saturday, although I won’t be able to attend.

I’m playing in Washington D.C. tomorrow, Saturday April 17. First time in Distrito Federal! It’s a Dutty Artz thing: Matt Shadetek and Jahdan Blakkamoore are coming down with me & we intend to shake things up. Info.

+

I’ve been checking a lot of data visualization projects lately. (I tend towards data narrativization, truth be told). This one is particularly fresh. And sobering:

Busy on tour, the blog gets a bit neglected… Andy & I are playing Tuesday through Sunday, a show (or two) each night. This much real-world sound translates into online silence (I don’t have an iPhone).

Warding off that soundlessness, here are two ultra-fresh new jams ::: MAJOR LAZER ft. Jahdan & a SWEDISH PIRATE CUMBIA REMIX by yours truly.

[Jahdan Blakkamoore]

first up: June is a good month for Dutty Artz’s Jahdan Blakkamoore, he features on Diplo and Switch’s reggae project ‘Major Lazer’ (album streaming now, out next week), and Jahdan also drops some verses on a Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry 12″. Here’s our man nicing up a Major Lazer tune.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s a pleasant surprise to hear Dip & co. workin with JD in a conscious roots reggae mode (JD’s roots roots run deep). Cash Flow is a very satisfying appetizer to the incoming Jahdan Blakkamoore album Buzzrock Warrior (produced by Matt Shadetek, myself, and the Dutty Artz family, out this September on Gold Dust). Which will crush everything.

When Geraldine Juárez, one of my favorite piratas/artistas, asked me to remix a Swedish piracy jingle to accompany a video of Mexico City’s young Internet Embassador, Mila, playing in an Embajada Pirata / Embassy of Piracy — made from repurposed US postal service envelopes and constructed in a D.F. park — I said claro k si! (Piracy? Distribution. I have been known to defend the pig.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Speaking of Sweden – as Europe swings even further to the right, at least the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in European Parliment! Kinda crazy! But nowhere near as crazy as, say, Dutch far-right or British National Party gains.. Anyhow, before we resume fighting the power, check Geraldine’s sweet video with my sweaty cumbia refix soundtrack:

Grey Filastine spent the holiday season doing an incredible DIY tour of Indonesia. Better yet, he’s writing about it (rather eloquently), posting video and photos — in short, Filastine has started a blog, and it looks to be a good one: Filastine Frequency.

Hello kitty kitty kitty … Are you an orphan? Are you Sudanese? Chadian? Are you a sub-Saharan African suffering from mild mental retardation? Are you an African woman suffering from the African male? Would you like an Oxfam biscuit? Organic antiretrovirals? Have you been raped? You might not know it, but you are an orphan, a refugee. Can we fly 103 of you to France to be loved? We can breastfeed you. We can make you a Darfur orphan. Even if you are not. If you are black and under 10 years old, please come talk to us.
Come kitty kitty.

i’ll be dropping a guest DJ set @ The Let Out w/ The Fader crew on East Village Radio tonite (friday), sometime in the 2nd half of the show, which runs 6-8pm. This is a warmup. I’ll be playing all African jams. Warming up for what? the Fader Africa issue release party!! – details & date said quietly, but: Johannesburg’s Blk Jks (an African ‘rock’ band who sound waaay better than all the ‘African-sounding’ rock bands), Eddie Stats , me, and more…

so I was talking with Sonido Martines the other day, and he was upset that a M.I.A. remix he did that gets played alot at Zizek ended up on Diplo’s blog without any mention of Sonido. Here’s a version with metadata intact.

It’s hard to know when the data gets corrupted. You can even think about remix culture as an ongoing exploration of the pleasures of rough data, scrambled bits, a thing’s integrity compromised by dirty outside info (or the impossibility of a thing’s integrity made apparent, take your pick).

But i mostly think of remixes as a series of decisions (even moreso than original music). Taken or not taken. The song already exists, what will you do to change it, and how much change do you need to enact before you can call it yours?

What makes the Sonido Martines remix so radical, in my opinion, is the flagrant simplicity of it: he added a short guacharaca loop to the original… and nothing else. One decision was made. One. The 1-bar loop doesnt even change or drop out, its just there. For the entire song. And, deservedly, he puts his name on it!

It helps, obviously, that Sonido’s decision involves a guacharaca* loop and (critically) not a baltimore-break loop or a disco-electro loop or rap vocal or any of the overrused initial decisions that kids turn to when doing a remix. The cultural context for his remix is foregrounded (loud in the mix, constant, repetitive, inescapable, and, before too long, invisible, inaudible). This is remix as placement, building context – even if you can’t pronounce guacharaca and don’t know what the loping scraping rhythm does in its other manifestations…

Screwed music & cumbias rebajadas (get Sonidos’ screwed cumbia mix for my radio show, thnx 2 WTC) also have that singular decision — slow it down. And honestly, given the wealth of possibilities offered by digital audio software, making a remix that involves only one decision is often a surprisingly lucid declaration of intent / intensity / focus. In this sense DJ Screw and Sonido Martines are philosophical remixers/producers: thinking seriously about one thing, thinking that one thing’s implications through, fully.